AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 198
ARES III SOL 197
[13:08] WATNEY: system_command: STATUS
[13:08] SYSTEM: Last message sent 04h31m ago. Last message received 04h56m ago. Last ping reply from probe 04h16m ago. WARNING: 50 unanswered pings.
[13:08] WATNEY: system_command: PING
[13:10] SYSTEM: No reply within 100 seconds. Repeat [Y/N]?
[13:11] WATNEY: Y
[13:11] SYSTEM: Reply received in 0.021 seconds.
[13:21] WATNEY: Okay. Venkat, I’m in Rover 2 about midway between the Hab and Site Epsilon. I’m afraid my detailed report on the Sol 196 cave incident will be delayed. I’ll send an abstract tonight.
Starlight Glimmer awoke this morning with a killer headache. According to Spitfire she’s running a fever brought on by magic strain and magic exhaustion. The two of them stayed in the Hab while the rest of us went to the cave to get the deep soil samples I’d need to test for a proper investigation.
We didn’t get any soil samples, at least not the kind I wanted. When we got to the site we found major subsidence and flooding in the farm area. Apparently the permafrost layers that used to be methane hydrate deposits collapsed after we left the cave yesterday. There are sinkholes all over the farm area ranging from ten centimeters to over a meter in depth, width averaging about 1.4 meters. Several of these sinkholes- the biggest ones- formed right dead center of the farm, breaking two of the water heating system lines and allowing water from the lines to fill and overflow the nearby sinkholes.
The farm is currently sludge.
I can’t tell you what bad news that is. The methane release caused a bloom of anaerobic bacteria. Removing the methane would have eventually caused those bugs to die off as oxygen seeped back down through the cultivated Martian soil. But excess water in the soil produces wetland conditions- which anaerobic bacteria love.
The rest of the day, and probably tomorrow and the next, is going to be extremely hard labor, at least up to our eight-hour EVA time limits. Cherry Berry and I spent this morning salvaging all the plants we could from the flooded area and replanting them. It’s probably a lost cause. I’ve already seen signs of root necrosis on the deeper roots of a lot of the alfalfa, and the wet conditions will make it worse. The potatoes aren’t as badly affected- they’re much more shallowly rooted, and their planting area was downslope and in a cooler patch of soil. But if we get much more than half the planned alfalfa harvest, it’ll be a miracle.
Meanwhile Dragonfly and Fireball worked on repairing the heating pipes. Until we get the soil leveled and partially dried out again, the water heating system has to remain offline. We can’t afford to add any more water to the system right now. (God, I remember when I was worried I wouldn’t have enough water to grow food with. Now I’m trying to figure out how to purge the crap from my topsoil…)
The current plan is to dig a well at the back wall of the chamber, as far downslope as we can go. We’ll manually bail out the water from there, which means a lot of backbreaking walks carrying sample bins full of water out to the airlock to dump downslope. In fact, considering all the water we’ve added over the past hundred and fifty sols, that’s probably going to have to be a daily chore from now on. We’ll use the dirt we dig out of the well to refill the sinkholes, once we’ve pulled all the possibly still living plants out of them and replanted them elsewhere.
You know, before I became an astronaut I never believed I would be so desperate as to even attempt to transplant mature alfalfa one fucking plant at a time. That’s how bad it is right now. We don’t have enough seed left to replant the entire affected area. And if any of the plants in the non-subsidence areas die from root necrosis, that loss is permanent. We have to at least try to save every plant we can, even if I know nine-tenths of the plants that got flooded are already dead.
So yeah, it’s fun times here. No magic for at least a week, maybe two. At least half the alfalfa crop wrecked, maybe more. Tons of back-breaking labor staring us all in the face.
So, fun times all around. How are you today?
[13:44] HERMES: We’re all good, thanks.
[13:46] JPL: Us too. Don’t rush the report, Mark. Your survival takes top priority. I’ve got our botany team started on water remediation for your system.
Spitfire watched, impassively, as four muddy, mucky, and smelly space suits exited Airlock 3. Without argument, without a word at all, the four figures, two bipeds and two quadrupeds, lined up for the decontamination shower.
Spitfire and Starlight had spent a very quiet day in the Hab. Starlight had requested one of the computers, sitting up in bed and reading from it for about an hour before she asked for it to be put away again. She’d napped off and on since then for most of the day, not even pretending to be anything other than tired, sleepy, and in a lot of pain. Spitfire had sat on the bunk closest to Starlight’s, watching, and waiting for another request.
She’d offered pain medicine. Starlight had refused, because the bottle was less than half full now. She’d offered fever medicine, not giving Starlight the option to refuse. Starlight took it without a protest.
The Pathfinder chat was up on the hab’s projection screen. They saw Mark’s message of continued disaster in the cave farm. They said nothing.
And now they were back, and the first in the shower, and the first out, was Mark. With his suit mostly clean of muck, he took it off, put it back in its special rack, and walked over to the ponies who’d stayed behind while the work was going on. “How is she?” he asked.
“Sick,” Spitfire said. “Fever. Too much magic.”
“But not too little,” Starlight added, chuckling softly as she rolled over in her cot. “Magic exhaustion from the other side for a change.”
Mark looked up at the projection, which still showed his message to Earth and the brief responses from Hermes and from Dr. Kapoor. “I, uh,” he began, “I see you saw the bad news.”
“How bad?” Spitfire asked.
“Pretty bad,” Mark admitted. “Most of the middle of the farm was gone when we got there- just gone. Sunk and submerged. Most of the water’s seeped down below the surface now, but that’s not a good thing. With the cave sealed above and below, there’s no place for it to go.”
“Sorry,” Starlight said. “My fault.”
“No,” Mark said. “My fault. Twice over. I fucked up.” He sighed and took a seat on the bunk next to Spitfire. “Your people said the cave didn’t need sealing. Now I think they were right. Sealing it raised the temperature, melted the permafrost, released the methane. And we wouldn’t have lost much air through the ground. We could have left it alone, and the water would be draining away to re-freeze somewhere way deep.” He shook his head. “But NASA didn’t want to leave well enough alone, and I trusted them on a question of magic instead of you.”
“Not your fault,” Starlight replied. “If the cave got warm, the methane would have melted anyway.”
“But still my fault,” Mark continued. “I was thinking yesterday that we had to act fast to save as many plants as possible from dying from the bad bacteria in the roots. So I didn’t take time to keep thinking out the plan. I rushed it. And now you’re here in bed, and the farm is half dead, because I forgot about the air already in the room and the space underground the methane took up.” Mark took Starlight’s hoof. “It was a bad plan, and I shouldn’t have dragged you into it. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t think of it either,” Starlight said. “And I’m supposed to be the mission scientist.”
“But it wasn’t your idea,” Mark said. “It was mine. My responsibility.”
Spitfire spoke up, mostly because she didn’t think she could stand another game of My Fault – Not Your Fault. “What we do now?” she said slowly. It was just so hard to think in English. The words ran away and hid from her.
“We rebuild the farm,” Mark said. “We’ll have to plant the last of the seed. We tried to replant alfalfa from the sinkholes, but I think most of them are drowned. We make up the difference in potatoes. We make more batteries, and we get off this rock before its surprises or our stupidity kill us.”
“But we don’t give up,” Starlight said quietly.
“No,” Mark said. “We work the problem. We find a way to live.”
Spitfire nodded. “Not just live. We find a way to fly.”
Mark nodded, getting back in line for a second, spacesuitless pass through the shower.
While Mark was in the shower, Spitfire spoke with her crewmates. They heard her suggestion, and they liked it. They dug through Mark’s food packs and found the thing in question, four times the size of any other food pack. They hid it, putting the rest of the food back in the cabinet just as Mark was drying off.
A couple of hours later, as suppertime neared, Dragonfly stepped forward. “Your attention, please, Mark Watney!” she proclaimed, causing Mark to look up from the computer he’d been idly pecking at for over an hour.
“Huh?”
“I come to you on behalf of a special group of people,” the bug-pony continued, grinning her cute fanged grin. “A group which, one day, everybody will join, but which today it is your turn to join.”
Fireball stepped forward. He’d apparently fashioned a half-dozen used sample labels and some adhesive into a makeshift paper hat, bent and twisted into a cone. “Your hat,” he said.
Mark, puzzled, allowed the short dunce cap to be placed on his head.
“For services to your crew and yourself below and behind the call of duty,” Dragonfly pressed on, “for using your head only as a place to keep your helmet, and for failing to be absolutely perfect at all times, Mark Watney, you are now a member of the Royal Buck-Up Society.”
The ponies pounded the floor with their hooves- pony applause. Fireball settled for clapping his claws the human way.
After a minute, Dragonfly said, “Now the members of the society will step forward and say what they did to get into the Society.” She bowed and added, “I failed to pay attention when operating my space suit and risked breaking it for good.”
Starlight Glimmer stepped forward, having got off her bunk for dinner. “I tried to cast a transmutation spell without sufficient energy, just to see if I could turn a pebble into a cherry, and nearly put a hole in the Hab.”
Fireball stepped forward. “I try… tried… to take home per-chlor-ate,” he said slowly. “It start…ed a fire that might have killed us.”
Spitfire was so impressed by Fireball’s effort to speak properly that she flubbed her own line. “I forget make sure all know…” She shook her head, ignoring the chuckles of the others as she concentrated and began again more slowly. “I forgot to make sure that every one knew the airlock was dangerous,” she said.
“Me too,” Cherry Berry said. “And we all almost died.”
Spitfire watched as Mark realized it was his turn to speak. “I, ah, I pushed you all into implementing a half-baked plan,” he said. “I forgot that matter takes up space. Twice. And we’re still cleaning up the results.”
“Now,” Dragonfly said, bringing forward the large bundle stolen from Mark’s food supplies, “in honor of our newest member, let us prepare the ceremonial feast.”
Mark looked at the oversized pack. “What’s this for?” he asked.
Spitfire reached a wing up and pointed at the label. “It says ‘turkey’,” she says. “Like ‘jive turkey.’”
Fireball grinned and added, “And you are what you eat.”
Mark couldn’t help chuckling. “Okay,” he said. “I accept this honor on one condition: who can tell me what the most important thing is about fu- er, bucking up?”
Dragonfly said it, and the others said it in chorus after her: “Don’t do it again.”
“Yeah.” He looked down at the long-forgotten Thanksgiving turkey and dressing roll. If it was anything like his other meals, Spitfire thought, it would be a year old and would still taste exactly the same as it did new. Military rations never changed in that respect. “Well, I guess I better cook this thing, huh?”
“By the way,” Spitfire asked, “what is turkey? Besides an insult, I mean.”
Mark’s smile vanished again, but he only paused a moment before he said, “A fat, rather stupid bird, barely capable of short flights. Like a really fat, ugly, long-necked, bald-headed chicken.”
It was Spitfire’s turn to stop smiling. “Oh,” she said. For a second she thought she would pass. After all, feathers meant sisters, right? But then… “How bad fly?” she asked.
“Wild ones, fifty to a hundred meters. Farm-raised, not at all.”
Spitfire considered this, and decided that she couldn’t be bothered to be a sister to a stupid ugly bird that couldn’t be bothered to fly away from a predator. “Can I have some?” she asked.
After all, she reasoned, it couldn’t possibly be as horrible as bacon.
And it wasn’t, but even with gravy and stuffing it wasn’t an experience she cared to have twice. After her small sample she went back to the alfalfa and potatoes the others were having.
Mark put most of the roll in the Hab fridge for later, filling up on potatoes. “Just like Thanksgiving,” he muttered. “Leftovers for a week.”
Spitfire didn’t get that- Mark said a lot of things she didn’t get even when she understood all the words.
But if it meant giving thanks none of them had died, that was fine by her.
The irony is palpable.
Too much water, too much air, too much heat; on a planet with almost none of these these things, they somehow used them to almost kill themselves.
Look on the bright side, Mark. You may have just had a successful test on terraforming Mars. Because you made a wetland, though I'm not sure how similar it was to something like the Florida Wetlands.
Tiny typo:
affected
Quit stressing yourself out over this Kris, it is not worth it... Take a full week off to rest your brain and formulate a plan going forward
Ah yes, the Royal Buck Up Society. I forget what I did to get inducted, but I'm 100% certain that I am a member.
8880086
I'm going to agree here. One chapter a day is very ambitious, but it's worked up to this point, over 100 days from the start. I think it's more than alright to take a break, even if it's only for a day or two. I'd hate to see this story turn into an obligation rather than a fun project.
That said, it's cool if you keep forging ahead. Just remember that it's fine to ease off the gas for a bit if you need to.
8880093
I am
8880111
Exactly what I was going at
Now they know why too much of something is pretty bad.
8880086
I second this recommendation, Kris. Please, take a breather before you burn yourself out.
8880086
8880111
I'm going to second this. If you have 5 or so chapters ahead you avoid having to retcon things to make it work.
8880071 No gators. Well, unless Fireball wants to swim around in the muck and surprise the others.
8880144 (raises hand) Guilty!
8880061 Yeah, on a frozen, dry, nearly airless, lifeless planet Mark managed to almost kill himself with too much heat, water, air, and plants.
I take it that the plan to put a pool with diving board into the cavern is now on hold?
I don't understand how one day of the water leaking from broken pipes swamped such a huge area. If the water flow rate was that high wouldn't it have long since flooded the back of the cave?
Though as I understand it wasn't there a water intake on the life support unit too because they used the water for heating on the Amicitas without venting it? The amount of water they'd have to dump from using it as a heating system for a space ship would be high enough to have a noticeable impact on trajectory. So shouldn't the life support unit also have a water intake they could activate to avoid having to shuffle buckets of water through the airlock, similar to the air intake?
Also the botanists NASA consults are probably going to come back and tell Watney he's an idiot for trying to transplant the alfalfa this way and worrying about seed stocks. Alfalfa is one of the types of plant that can be propagated by cuttings. He shouldn't have tried to save the rotting roots. Just cut the plants off at the base to contain the damage like an amputation, and then prepared multiple cuttings from them for replanting. His efforts to transplant the alfalfa have probably just meant the plants lose the resources they could have used for a successful cutting failing to survive the rot.
For that matter because they have some healthy alfalfa left at the edges of the field, they can carry out cutting propagation to restore the numbers without worrying about their seed stocks. While you're recommended to use certain chemicals to increase your success rate, you will still have a decent success rate without anything beyond the usual water and soil. He could probably turn 10% undamaged into 50% of the field in coverage on the first go with a reasonable rooting rate. Possibly even completely replenish the field from that same 10% if Cherry Berry's magic can up the rooting rate. So they'd probably only lose one harvest.
Granted Mark doesn't necessarily know these things. He is a botanist, but he's not an alfalfa specialist. This means he screwed up with a half baked plan because he tried to respond too fast instead of talking things through a second time in two days, which would probably be a nasty morale hit, especially when this little team building exercise just talked about how "Don't do it again" is the most important thing.
Though NASA should have dumped a pile of alfalfa texts on him when the data transfer rate was still good enough, considering alfalfa is essential to his survival right now. There's no indication that NASA did that though, so that's really on NASA, because someone there should have thought of that. It's not like Mark hasn't had enough time spent sitting in the Hab to read a couple books that would improve his chance of survival even marginally.
I'm kind of hoping for word from Dragonfly about the Cave though. I expect it has some commentary of its own.
What? No, this wasn't an issue of magic. Sure, it was solved with magic but the issue was mundane physics. And the problem it caused wasn't magical either, it was still mundane physics. The same result would have happened if they sealed the cave with some physical compound.
It's impressive that you've been able to keep up the schedule, but it's only going to work so far. When the manure hits the Rich Purnell plan, you are not merely permitted but requested and required to take a break, plot it out thoroughly, and make sure it all hangs together rather than rushing through and having to retcon it. If you don't, the story will suffer.
Don't worry. We've followed you this far, we're not going away now.
I seem to be missing something: how did sealing the cave turn it into a thermal insulator? If anything I would have expected increased conductance.
Flooding I did see coming for while now. But, instead of manual labour, I would let the vacuum of space and the water lines do the work. Or the hab water reclaimer.
8880333
The cave was contantly leaking before, I'd assume the lack of escaping mass would greatly slow heat transfer. After all, transferring heat into the air is hard to begin with, air that's a hundred times less dense probably isn't any better.
Plus the cave evidently has six inches of near pure silicon dioxide sealing it before a thicker layer of igneous concrete. Silicon dioxide happens to be a pretty good insulator.
Is your buffer still dead? I am impressed you are able to write every single day.
8880004
True dat.
Also, haven't seen the movie since it was in theaters.
8880258
My guess is hot water from heating pipes sped up permafrost melting.
The last good meal?
Now its Potatos all the way down?
How to get rid of the water: take a hose, put an on/off valve on it, run one end out the airlock (or drill a small hole in the wall near the airlock to run the hose thru), and run the other end into the flooded area. The pressure differential between the inside of the cave and the outside will suck the water out, where it will evaporate in the thin Martian atmosphere.
In a maelstrom of disaster, a tiny port is found.
8880301
Besides, earth had no way of knowing about the methane deposits. Sealing the cave was done to prevent the chance of it collapsing, which it still hasn't. As much as I was on Maud's side in the earlier chapters, this wasn't anyone's fault. This was another completely unpredictable accident.
So, the funny thing here in this chapter that I immediately asked myself last chapter...
"Uhm... Guys. If you use a spell to pull all the methane out of the ground below you. What do you do with the pockets of empty space-"
*This chapter happens where farm collapses into sinkholes...*
"...Right. Carry on."
8880478
Eh, they could have theorized there might have been pockets, but it's pretty out there and I don't blame them for not thinking of it, not for not thinking the better isolation might make it melt. And the equestrian side wouldn't have any way to know at all.
8880086
People will often say things like this to content creators, all the way from the hobbyist up to the professional dev team, and as well intentioned as it is...it's nonsense.
Taking time off reduces reader engagement. It is as simple as that. If someone wants to get as many readers as possible, as satisfied as possible, then frequent updates is one of their surest methods to accomplish that.
Does this often damage the content being created? Sure. However that is balanced for a creator by the knowledge that taking the time to maintain quality, comes at the cost of their metrics. It sucks, but that's reality.
8880394
Madness. Every hole is a weakness, also ceramic has a habit of cracking if it isn't drilled right, I'm amazed the ceramic didn't massively crack when the door popped out.
Also after the water's gone that hose will take the air. They'd have to babysit it and then seal it... probably permanently (I'd goo seal it on both ends) even that leaves the possibility of something going wrong and the crew getting another panic call about the farm losing are pressure.
I still wouldn't rule it out.
Well, if you're looking for ideas for filler chapters to help your buffer, remember that Mark was on Mars for over 500 Sols in the book, which means that he had to have had at least one birthday (and maybe two depending on when it fell) on Mars during his stay. You could easily have a chapter dedicated to it, with birthday messages forwarded through Pathfinder from his parents, Hermes, NASA, JPL, and so on.
Toss in arbitrary birthdays for the other 5 crew members, and you got 6 chapters right off the bat.
8880258 Water was used on Amicitas as a heat redistribution system- moving it from the side of the ship facing the sun to the side facing away from the sun, so the ship wouldn't have to do passive heating rolls (barbecue rolls). All you have to do is circulate water with a pump (which the system had) and the heat would average out to a comfortable level, at least in Equus local space.
In the cave there's no heat "input" and a lot of heat output. If you just circulated an amount of water without adding more, it'd freeze. The only way our heroes can heat enough water hot enough to make a substantial contribution to warming the soil in the cave enough for farming is to heat it on the Equestria side of the link. That requires that old water, cooled by the soil, has to be dumped to make way for the new water.
And the water didn't swamp a huge area. The farm, remember, is TINY by Earth standards. They started with a heated area of ten meters wide by sixty meters long in an ovate chamber about twenty meters wide at its widest point and about one hundred forty meters long. A few little sinkholes of the kind described in the chapter, most of a night to fill them with water from broken pipes, and preexisting damage from the methane issue... well, it doesn't take much to wreak havoc with six hundred square meters of garden.
Yes, alfalfa can be transplanted by cuttings. But Mark doesn't have rooting hormone. He doesn't have really bright sunlight. And he does have a lot of alfalfa plants which have had their leaves submerged for between twelve and eighteen hours, which is to say poor candidates for transplant. He's salvaging all he can before he goes to healthy plants for cuttings, because the rooting rate for those cuttings won't be very good, and because the ponies need to EAT those cuttings.
8880333 There's no way to run a line out of the cave without dismantling the heating system altogether- they used all their spare plumbing for it. Also, they'd need magic, because they'd essentially have to run a hose out the airlock to get it outside at this point. Moving the water reclaimer to the cave is a non-trivial task: it's large and heavy even in Martian gravity, and without it the Hab plumbing ceases to work.
8880364 I was pretty impressed myself at Sol 196, which is 5500 words written from 6 to 11 PM that day, with me revising all the way. (Well, I'd been mentally writing it that morning and the day before, working on scenarios and possible cute moments, but 6 to 11 PM was the typing time.)
8880379 I avoided typing class in school (when it was on typewriters). I started out hunting and pecking on a Commodore Vic-20. Today, when I'm rushing and when I'm only copying text on paper, I can type up to 60 wpm. Doing stuff like this- answering comments- or coming up with new material takes a lot longer because of the time I have to spend on word choice and deciding how to answer.
8880394 The only hose is about three meters that Mark has for fixing burst hoses in the water reclaimer, and he's already used some of that up after the Sol 88 breach. Not nearly enough to reach from the airlock to anywhere useful- hell, barely enough to get THROUGH the airlock. Also: holes in the airlock, or anywhere in a pressure vessel, are Bad Ideas and not to be performed idly.
8880478 That's logic. Guilt doesn't care about logic.
8880559 You missed a bit. Ceramic didn't work out, so they used a different spell that just compressed and sealed the existing rock. So no, they did not blow the airlock out the side of a teacup.
8880363
If there was an air leak to the the outside, it would have eroded quickly. No explosions yet.
I assumed the main loss of heat would be the basalt conducting it away, and the permafrost heating up.
Silicon dioxide is not a good insulator. It is in fact about as good an conductor as concrete or basalt.
How about moving the water flow down into the deeper cave? It would probably just freeze there, but that's fine. should be a lot less work the lifting it up out the airlock.
I'll bet with a little more thought and some input from NASA they'll realize that they have the materials on hand to make an Archimedes screw to lift water out of the well and into a channel, hose, or pipe, to their waste pond area. All it would require is some tubing wrapped around a spindle with a rudimentary crank to turn it.
Well, it is obvious that the Maretians cannot add more water to the cave, because they have no easy way to remove it, so the current water heating system is useless. IMO they should rebuild it as a closed loop heating system, based on RTG generator and electric or mechanical pump. Alen ship had such electric water pump as a component of the heat distribution system.
In case of a mechanical pump, it can be based on a simple Stirling engine, with RTG as a power source.
Just put RTG in an insulated box of a similar base size, put a water cooled metal plate as a lid of the box and follow this project:
http://www.animatedengines.com/ltdstirling.html
The Stirling engine can be also used as an additional source of heat and electrical energy when the Maretians are traveling to the Schiaparelli Crater.
Of course, specialists at NASA will be more than glad to create a working project.
8880964 Thank you. You've just given me today's chapter.
But not the Stirling engine, because that would involve building tight-tolerance moving parts out of ragged pieces of sheet metal using mostly wrenches and screwdrivers.
8880705
At 1.3 W/m°K, it's pretty close to things like fire clay and construction bricks. While not known for being the best insulators ever, these materials can keep the heat inside an oven or your house in a much denser atmosphere than mars.
Everything leaks, including the ISS. This is not a problem for Watney and friends because the air (and the small amount of heat it carries) is replaced, and a couple of molecules leaving at a time won't compromise the structure of the cave. However, over the massive internal area of the cave, I could see that loss being significant. Additionally, the cave presumably has a lot less internal surface area after sealing, which lowers the rate of heat transfer by a lot, even ignoring the material of the walls.
8881090
You are right, there is no time to construct such Stirling engine/water pump system before the cave freezes.
But it can be done in a year. Maretians have a large number of metal scraps (preferably aluminum alloys from the MDV) that can be melted using magic, dragon breath or rocket fuel and cast into clay forms. Final treatment of moving parts can be done by borrowing one of the electric motors from the rover and building a simple metal lathe, using magically shaped quartz crystals as cutting elements, drills and plain bearings.
And it would give Maretians something to do. Especially Fireball would feel appreciated.
Stirling engine has a theoretical 50% efficiency, so it can theoretically produce 500 W of electric power from 1 kW RTG. Even being able to produce additional 300 W + 100 W RTG would shorten the travel time to Schiaparelli by half.
P.S.
They would be also able to take the lathe and other tools they made with them, increasing the chance of a successful MAV modification. Not to mention the critical metalworking experience they would gain.
8880697
Well... He does have sunlight. Really, really bright sunlight, bright to the point where there was concern of it by itself being heat risk. The sun crystals are really, really good at what they do. And it would seem the hormone is a bonus, not a nessesity (Earth Pony efforts would produce massively better results I think)
8881199
Are you suggesting to disassemble RTG? I don't know exactly how hot these pellets inside, but they should be more then twice the environment temperature to get 50%. And Stirling cycle is not Carnot cycle. And real life engines (especially crudely built) don't work at theoretical efficiency.
8881195
You need to compare it with what it replaces. Those cracks where filled with air. 0.0262 W/m°K, vs 1.3 W/m°K
Id say the cave became ever so slightly more conductive. with those cracks removed.
A couple of molecules here and there over a long period of time will make a difference. Just look at how electronic circuits decay by migration of copper atoms. Failure does become inevitable, we just don't know the timescale.
You can't really count the surface area of cracks, convection does not apply in them.
8880964
How is this more efficient then removing the rtg fuel pellets and strategically placing them in the soil?
Id say the RTG is not a requirement for the road trip, as much as food is. They wouldn't have room for it anyways.
How are the cherries doing? I recall that they were near the edge of the farm, so they wouldn't have been flooded, but that obviously wasn't the only thing that went wrong.
8881454
I'll give ya everything else but I don't get this. Heat sinks are essentially a material with more surface area than normal, where it is and how fine it is just increase the force required to circulate air. With such a massive pressure difference, that should not be an issue. Plus, we don't know the porosity of the material, even irregular holes found in most geodes must increase the surface area by multiple times.
Another way I just thought of explaining how the air might make a huge difference is this: With the air escaping (even very very slowly) it heats a very large area of the dust it's moving through as it escapes, filling the space in between clumps of dirt and whatnot. If the air, however, cannot escape at all, then the only heat transfer must occur over the surface area of the exterior of the sealed cylinder, where it is in direct contact with regolith, which is generally going to be much smaller. Assuming the cave is putting off a lot of heat (hundreds of gallons of boiling hot water and massive lights) it's entirely possible that the new seal is not able to move nearly as much heat as the air. That is why geothermal plants often just pump water into the ground and let it find it's own way back, it'll fill every crack (as fluids do) and collect as much heat as fast as possible. With the cave sealed, there is no longer a fluid filling the gaps in the martian regolith/permafrost, so it would be less effective at transfering heat, IMO.
8878368 That story seems to be dead, and it's far longer than a story like that needs to go on. The impact, the sense of dread of shock, is lost if it drags on, which is the primary reason classic horror stories tend to be short stories.
Horror like Stephen King's relies much on constantly reinforcing and refreshing the weirdness, and as such the actual 'horror' impact itself is muted. It becomes mainly a strange story with horror aspects.
8880697
That doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. What was Amicitas' main heating system if the water was just for heat redistribution? The 800 watts worth of space heaters shouldn't be enough by themselves. Based on past descriptions it seemed like the water system was always the main heating system.
Six hundred meters of area is quite a lot to flood with water. However the issue is that the size of the cave hasn't really changed much over the whole time they've been there. They were inputting water at the same rate as they were before the pipes broke. They were always just dumping the water in the cave. So where was the water going before that it wasn't a problem before, but is one now?
Rooting hormone is preferable for making alfalfa grow from cuttings, but it's a type of plant where it isn't required. You entirely can get cuttings of alfalfa to grow without anything more than water and soil. Alfalfa plants that have had their root systems flooded and destroyed by anaerobic bacteria are really bad candidates for transplants. That's the reason that transplanting is almost certainly doomed. Cuttings would have a higher survival rate because of the starting conditions of the alfalfa. The stems and leaves were damaged, but less damaged than the root systems. The bright sunlight is something they at least have good enough substitute for, because Watney noted in an earlier chapter that the plants were growing like he would expect them to in ideal conditions on Earth.
This is off topic for the chapter, but something I was wondering about for a while.
Is the Equestrian spaceship's name pronounced Ah-MEE-chee-tee-ahs (Google translate's pronunciation in Latin, "friendships"), ah-me-CHEE-tee-ahs (what I think it ought to be), or ah-mi-SEE-tee-ahs (what I thought it was before checking, based on my knowledge of Spanish)? (Amicitia is friendship, Amicitias is friendships.)
Please, KISS ALREADY!
... I may have previously stated that I have a problem.
... It's kind of ironic that all this was caused by the overabundance of heat and water.
Ugh. Yeah, I was wondering what that constant exhaustion would cause on the long run
Oh, right... yes, that was also bound to happen
Yay. Fun times
Oh, huh. Well that's different.
Aaahahaha. He'll love it.
Heh, yea. Always too much. We don't celebrate Thanksgiving, but I've seen the same with Christmas turkey.
Oh this is fun.
HAH!
Very.
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Irony's a bitch.